Our app supports decisions made on 500-1000 research proposals for our telescopes. The proposals have a lot of dimensions, so the users would like to be able to explore similar proposals. ("Proposals that don't need a laser guide star and involve 'targets of opportunity'")

Our current UI does this with a tabbed box that has two rows of checkboxes marked "Exclude" and "Only." This wouldn't be terrible, but for the fact that some categories are binary and some have enumerations (e.g., the need for a laser guide star is a yes/no, but there are several flavors of target of opportunity). The end result is a UI that only George Boole could love.

I've tried to do some sketches taking the periodic table as inspiration, but the element count is high and the number of dimensions seems too big -- I can't fit hundreds of tiles big enough to show ~10 characteristics on a display.

Any thoughts on inspirations or "just" well-implemented UXs in a similar vein?

3 Answers
3

The critical issue, from your description, is finding related/similar proposals.

Have a look at this visualisation: force directed layout, which could cluster your documents, giving you the kind of periodic table you are looking for, that can then be explored.

The UX advantage here is that instead of requesting each group of related proposals with a separate filter query, you get all the groups at once. Less interaction is required to accomplish the task.

It does require a shift in thinking about what a filter is - thinking about what it does for the user rather than the underlying mechanics. Is Google doing filtering when it scores and sorts search results? I'd say 'Yes'.

So if the filters you want are the ones George Bool would love, then you have to look for a nicer way to build expressions. I'd wager that you will find you get more mileage looking at filters based on similarity scores. The UI for these can be simpler - a weight (a 0 to 100 slider) for each dimension saying how important it is in your current partitioning of proposals.

Low-Hanging-Fruit

Doing a cluster based visualization
interface, even with protovis to
jumpstart the process, is going to be significant
work. You can get benefit from
proposal similarity scoring earlier
without that visualization. Offer a
sorted list of proposals sorted by
similarity to a chosen proposal.
That's quick and easy to implement.
Click beside a proposal and it moves
to the top, and the list is re-sorted
by similarity to it.

I haven't seen an actual great example, but I think you should be able to add rules dynamically like Outlook's rule mechanism. You can combine that by using a dynamic listbox where to quickly use the keywords to locate rules.

So:

Enter keyword [__________]

When you type 'la' it hints 'laser'. Then you can either select to 'include' or 'exclude':

Perhaps the way outlook underlines the words so the rules are presented in human language ("when the from-address _contains_ 'useful', move this message to folder not-useful") You can then click on the parts you need to change: from_address can be subject, contains can be 'doesn't contain' or 'is exactly', etc.)
I don't think this should be the primary way of entering rules, but it makes changing or refining a rule very easy.